Jacobsean Social Science
= following the work of Jane Jacobs, an approach that looks at interlinked city systems, rather than nation-states
Description
Peter Taylor:
"The social science I am trying to develop takes its name from Jane Jacobs, author of some pathbreaking books on economics and the city. Like the two approaches previously described, she similarly rejects the state as a fundamental unit of social analysis. Her concern has been what she calls the “myth of the national economy” – she asks why should politically defined state-spaces delimit economies. However, in this criticism of state-centric thinking we are provided with a concrete, analytical alternative: cities and city-regions. Thus she identifies “national economies” (sic) as politically-defined “mish-mash amalgams of city economies”. For Jacobs, dynamic cities are the starting point for understanding economic life and how it grows.
My admiration for Jacobs stems back to her 1984 prediction of the economic demise of Japanese cities because of their shouldering the burden of the Japanese state (rural-based political parties squandering urban-generated wealth). Nobody else saw the end of Japan’s “economic miracle” while it was still in full swing. In the 1990s when she was proven correct, I began a personal re-evaluation of her work on cities which has culminated in my researches on the world city network. Her basic argument is that cities (not states) are the fundamental units of economic life and that the latter is made vibrant and dynamic through economic interactions within and between cities. Thus economic growth is equated with dynamic cities, not state development.
I equate Jacobs’ dynamic cities (wherein new work is created, new production replacing imports that creates a more complex city economy) with Saskia Sassen’s global cities (wherein massive quantities of new work has been created in professional and financial services, referred to in the literature as advanced producer services). Given that the latter work is global in scope, I focus on cities as networks, and the agents of network formation – professional and financial service firms with their worldwide office networks (prime contemporary creators of new city work). Thus I treat globalization as structured through contemporary dynamic cities (global service centres) that form a world city network.
This specific conceptualisation of a contemporary world city network has proven to have much potential for empirical analyses. By focussing on the network-making agents that interlock cities (such as banks) data has been assembled that can be modelled to provide estimates of particular flows between cities. This relies on the simple idea that the larger a firm’s office, the more flows (information, instruction, plans, strategy, advise, etc) to other offices it will generate. Thus through collecting information on many offices within a city, indirect measures of that city’s links to other cities can be computed. Following Sassen, this method, using the interlocking network model, was initially applied to advanced producer service firms but application has subsequently been broadened to other, sometimes non-economic, agents of network formation. For instance, NGOs operate through cities across the world and thus contribute to their interlocking as a world city network."